Vila Nova de Gaia, portugal

Vila Nova de Gaia pilot site - Centro Escolar Manuel Antonio Pina

Climate targets and deadlines

Portugal’s climate policy is entirely aligned with the EU-goals and targets including a reduction of greenhouse gas emission between 45 % and 55 %, and reinforce the weighting of renewable energies to 47 % by 2030.

National Energy and Climate Plan 2021-2030 (NECP 2030) sets eight national targets for the 2030 horizon to implement the five dimensions’ strategy: decarbonization, energy efficiency, energy security, internal market and research, innovation, and competitiveness.

Besides NECP 2030, Portugal developed a Roadmap For Carbon Neutrality 2050 (RNC 2050) that sets the path to carbon neutrality in a sustained manner, establishes the main guidelines, and identifies cost-effective options to achieve this end in different socio-economic development scenarios, which implies reducing greenhouse gas emissions by more than 85 %, compared to 2005, and ensuring an agricultural and forestry carbon sequestration capacity of around 13 million tonnes.

Goals and challenges for buildings along the road

Energaia (PORTO) operates and procures for more than 1,700 buildings in municipalities south of the Porto Metropolitan Area. Around 20 % of the buildings in the municipality (Vila Nova de Gaia) are schools spending more than €0.5 million on electricity alone.

To reduce energy consumption and achieve national targets, municipalities must have a crucial role. Schools and administrative buildings are larger energy consumers, and by investing and renewing that type of buildings the municipality (council) is giving an example to their citizens and organizations of what must be done to achieve national targets.

Also, the challenge is to engage the biggest number of companies as possible, raise awareness of citizens about energy efficiency and create solutions to reduce energy consumption.

How procuRE slots into this story and how it might help to achieve above

Innovative solutions for the framework are needed and are ensured on the NECP 2030 as a priority, and even on the long-term strategy for carbon neutrality. With procuRE, these innovative solutions can be found and tested in real-life conditions.

procuRE assumes an important role as the procurers will invest in research and development. This investment will allow finding new potential developers, suppliers, and companies that have the know-how to create innovative solutions or even continue developing solutions in an embryonal stage, to reduce energy consumption and supply 100 % of renewable energy to buildings.